Gigabyte recently updated its BRIX line of small form factor PCs to include Intel Haswell processors, 4K display support, and additional IO port options. The new BRIX systems measure 29.9mm x 107.6mm x 114.4mm and feature a chassis constructed of anthracite aluminum with a glass top panel. The new BRIX PCs come in four SKUs, each of which comes with an Intel Haswell processor of i7, i5, i3, or Celeron varieties.

The BRIX PCs come with the case, a small Gigabyte motherboard, an Intel CPU, and a wireless module with 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0 radios. Users can choose their own mSATA SSD, DDR3 SO-DIMMs (two per system, up to 16GB), and operating system. The front panel of the Haswell-powered BRIX PCs includes two USB 3.0 ports and a headphone jack that doubles as an optical S/PDIF output.

The back panel of the BRIX system includes:

2 x USB 3.0 ports

1 x RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet (Realtek RT8111G NIC)

2 x Video outputs:

1 x Mini-DipslayPort

1 x HDMI

1 x DC-in

1 x Kensington Lock

Internally, the BRIX PCs have one Mini-PCI-E slot, one mSATA slot, and two DDR3 SO-DIMM slots. The Mini-PCI-E slot is used by the pre-installed Wi-Fi module, however. Processor options include the Intel Celeron 2955U, Core i3-4010U, Core i5-4200U, and Core i7-4500U. At the high end, the i7-4500U is a dual core CPU with HyperThreading, 4MB cache, and clockspeeds of 1.8GHz base and 3.0GHz turbo. The i5 also has turbo boost, but only up to 2.6GHz. The Core i3-4010U has HyperThreading but no Turbo Boost while the Celeron is stripped of both Turbo Boost and HyperThreading. The chart below lists all the processor specifications.

BRIX Model

GB-BXi7-4500

GB-BXi5-4200

GB-BXi3-4010

GB-BXCE-2955

Processor

Core i7-4500U

Core i5-4200U

Core i3-4010U

Celeron 2955U

Cores / Threads

2 / 4

2 / 4

2 / 4

2 / 2

Clockspeeds

1.8 GHz to 3.0 GHz

1.6 GHz to 2.6 GHz

1.7 GHz

1.4 GHz

CPU Cache

4MB

3MB

3MB

2MB

Maximum RAM

16GB

16GB

16GB

16GB

The new Haswell-powered Gigabyte BRIX PCs include the GB-BXCE-2955, GB-BXi3-4010, GB-BXi5-4200, and GB-BXi7-4500. Unfortunately, the company has not yet released pricing or availability for the SFF devices. More informtation on the Haswell models can be found on this Gigabyte microsite.

Read more about the Gigabyte BRIX platform and how it compares to the competition here.

The Tech Report picked up some technical details on the C2000 series of Avoton SoC's bound for business as Microservers or high density servers. Avoton is a true 64-bit chip and supports DDR3 and DDR3L DRAM at speeds up to 1600 MT/s and they have abandoned the FSB in favour of the crossbar style IDI that has been present in Intel's larger chips since Nehalem. They've also replaced the Southbridge with a South Complex that provides 16 lanes of PCIe 2.0 on the fastest interconnect with a data connectivity attached alongside the PCIe. That consists of pair of SATA 6Gbps, four SATA 3 ports and four ethernet controllers capable of 2.5Gbps which are capable of teaming and offering 10Gbps. Check out their article for more on the hottest thing to hit server racks that won't put you in debt for life.

"Today, Intel officially unveiled its Atom C2000-series products, based on the Avoton system-on-a-chip, so we have the opportunity to offer a little more detail about this distinctive new SoC."

The new Silvermont based 22nm Avoton chips are officially available as of today as Intel attempts to outmaneuver ARM's attempts to enter the server market. These chips are not the Atom you have grown to know and despise, this is a brand new architecture which Intel claims will be vastly superior in performance while using much less power. They are billed as true SOCs and reflect the changing server market which is now more focused on modular systems of relatively low performance which can be networked together to provide just as much processing power as is needed. The Register did not get any performance numbers yet, hopefully we will see these chips in action soon so we can judge for ourselves if they have what it takes to make it in the server room.

"If you were expecting Chipzilla to keep its server-chip powder dry until its Intel Developer Forum next week, surprise! It looks like Intel is going to jump the gun and get its "Avoton" Atom server chips into the field this Wednesday, as you can see from this announcement preview that Intel sent out to press and analysts over the Labor Day holiday in the States."

If you read our Intel Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E review posted earlier today, you likely saw our overclocking results. After publication I got contacted by ASUS asking why we didn't attempt to overclock our CPU sample with one of their updated motherboards. In truth we were unable to get any of the pre-release UEFI firmware updates to apply to our P9X79 Pro or Rampage IV Extreme motherboards.

Move on to this afternoon and we were finally able to patch up the v1.02 of the P9X79 Pro and tossed in the same Core i7-4960X sample we used in our initial story. What were the results?

Click to Enlarge

As you can see above we were able to overclock the processor to 4.413 GHz at UEFI set voltage of only 1.40v. Previously we were only reaching a 4.3 GHz overclock and even had to up the voltage a bit higher.

I was hoping that I would be able to reach the 45x multiplier but alas it wasn't meant to be. I will keep messing with our 4960X to see how much further can push it.

You won't see the release of Intel's new processor as being described as "fascinating as whatever was happening with that rancher dude in Wyoming with the chickens and the laser pointer", you will have to head to The Tech Report to enjoy that type of comment. Nor will you finally learn that 5% of people who buy this chip "Need more knobs for extreme overclocking."; unfortunately he is probably right on the money as there are very few reasons to upgrade from Sandy Bridge-E to IVB-E. Stick your tongue in your cheek and read the usual benchmarks delivered a few percentage points faster than the last generation.

Very Minor Changes

November 14th, 2011 - that is the date that Intel introduced the LGA 2011 socket and the Sandy Bridge-E processor. Intel continued their pattern of modifying their mainstream architecture, Sandy Bridge at the time, into a higher performance (and higher priced) enthusiast class. The new socket differentiated these components into their own category for workstation users and others who demand top performance. Today Intel officially unveils the Ivy Bridge-E platform with essentially the same mindset.

The top end offering under the IVB-E name is the Core i7-4960X, a six-core, HyperThreaded processor with Turbo Boost technology and up to 15MB of L3 cache. Sound familiar? It should. There is really very little different about the new 4960X when compared to the Sandy Bridge-E Core i7-3960X released in 2011. In fact, the new processors use the exact same socket and will work on the same X79 motherboards already on the market. (Pending, of course, on whether your manufacturer has updated the UEFI/Firmware accordingly.)

The Ivy Bridge-E Platform

Even though the platform and features are nearly identical between Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E there are some readers that might need a refresher or maybe had never really investigated Socket 2011 products before today. I'll step through the major building blocks of the new Core i7-4960X just in case.

We have heard of another success in Intel's move into the security market from an 80 person team headed by Moty Fania which has created a device capable of real time scanning of everything that occurs on a corporate network. It can handle four to six billion network events a day in its current state and the team claims a very high rate of true positives when scanning the internal Intel network for signs of breaches and industrial espionage attempts. Sadly they did not disclose the hardware on which this tool is running to The Register but it is possible the custom software could be released by McAfee seeing as how Intel purchased them not too long ago. With the current global climate they might have chosen a better response when asked the name of the software, the statement "it would not be "productive" to disclose its name" is perhaps not the most reassuring statement to make right now.

"Intel has created a Hadoop-based rig that analyses just about every network event in the company – four to six billion of them on business days - in close to real time so it can spot threats including industrial espionage."

The usual suspects are expecting to be able to start shipping Hawaii based AMD cards some time in October with availability soon after that, at least in theory. They will be shipping to system builders and retailers at that time so you shouldn't be expecting the chance to buy a brand new GPU before Halloween but you could reasonably expect one before the New Year. We don't know how this new chip will handle frame pacing on multiple displays but we can certainly hope the extra time in the shop will help.

"As AMD is set to announce its next-generation high-end GPU codenamed Hawaii, graphics card players including Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International (MSI) and PowerColor are expected to start mass shipping related products in October, according to sources from the upstream supply chain."

Despite a slight decline in PC sales compared to last quarter, graphics processors are on the rise. Jon Peddie Research attributes the heightened interest in graphics, with a decline in systems, to a trend towards multiple GPUs in a system. Crossfire and SLI, according to the report, are not driving this drift but they are relevant. More importantly, consumers are adding discrete graphics to systems with integrated solutions.

AMD has experienced an increase in shipments of 47% for laptop APUs. Desktop heterogeneous processors declined but, in all, shipments increased 11%. Intel, likewise, saw an increase albeit just 6%. NVIDIA declined 8%. AMD now enjoys a 5.8% lead in total market share over NVIDIA.

Many PCs have access to multiple graphics processors simultaneously. With an increase of available GPUs, software developers might take the plunge into fully supporting heterogeneous architectures. You could imagine a game which offloads physics or AI pathfinding to secondary graphics. Sure, the increased heat would slightly limit the turbo-performance of the CPU, but the increased parallel performance should overtake that decreased serial performance for a sensible developer.

JPR claims an average of nearly 1.4 GPUs available per system.

The increased laptop heterogeneous processors is a major win for AMD. Still, I wonder how much Never Settle played in to users dropping discrete graphics into machines which would otherwise have integrated (chipset or processor) graphics. The discrete graphics market has declined and yet somehow AMD got a boost from double-attach or replaced graphics.

The report only discusses consumer x86 tablets, desktops, laptops, and some hybrid between the previous three categories. Other processor architectures or x86 servers are not covered.